To survive in the modern manufacturing era, you need greater visibility across your entire supply chain. You need to be able to plan more effectively and respond to changes quickly. In short, you need modern, digital solutions that make every area of your organization more efficient, effective, and productive.

Digital transformation is all about building connections and visibility across your entire value chain. Let’s explore key technologies to make that possible.

Big tech, big benefits

The 5 technologies that are helping manufacturers digitally transform are:

Cloud—If there’s one technology that’s the catalyst for digital transformation, it’s the cloud. In many ways, it’s the glue that binds together the other technologies we’re discussing—and that makes them possible. If you haven’t already cloud-enabled your major production, supplier, and customer solutions, it’s time to get with the program. The cloud is secure, safe, and available to everyone in your value chain you grant permission to, at every hour of every day.

Mobility—With full-featured mobile apps, you can work whether or not you’re connected to the server. You get ease of use, portability, and convenience that allows you to stay on top of problems and troubleshoot them from anywhere. Away from your office doesn’t have to mean disconnected from your value chain.

Internet of Things (IoT)—Sensors have become more affordable and Internet connectivity faster and more reliable, driving the growth of the IoT. With all those sensors generating data, you can now identify supply and production issues more quickly, manage tooling, and see potential tooling failures before they happen, and get real-time feedback on production quality. Of course, that all depends upon your analytics capabilities—which means, Big Data.

Big Data—Assuming that one sensor takes one reading every second, that’s 86,000 records generated in one day. Experts predict that by 2020, there will be 50 times the digital content of what existed just a year ago. You need the advanced analytics of Big Data to classify and quantify all this information, so you can identify potential issues. With advanced analytics, you have real-time, actionable information on supply, production, quality, delivery, and customer support issues—all at your fingertips.

Supplier management and collaboration—Email and spreadsheets just won’t cut it in the digital age. They’re not fast enough, reliable enough, or accurate enough. In fact, researchers have found that up to 90% of all spreadsheets have serious errors. To create greater efficiency in your value chain, you need a single source of truth for all supplier interactions. That’s where a solid supplier management and collaboration platform like LiveSource comes in. It gives you one place where everyone who’s part of your chain can get real-time information and act upon it. Plus, it provides the capability to collaborate across your supply chain to cooperatively manage risk, innovate more rapidly, and solve problems creatively Because everyone will have access to the same centralized information, you can make better decisions, faster.

Choose the right solution

With LiveSource, you get a cloud-based, flexible, integrated platform for all your supplier interactions. It gives you the data visibility you need to forecast accurately and keep production running smoothly in this modern, digital age of manufacturing.

LiveSource is how manufacturers take hidden risks out of their supply chains. It shows you everything from your suppliers’ certification status to last-minute updates to the bill of materials – so you can know what’s coming.

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